Zero-Day Advisory

Fortinet Discovers Oracle VirtualBox VM Remote DoS Vulnerability

Summary

Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered a remote DoS vulnerability in Oracle VirtualBox VM.
Oracle VirtualBox is a powerful virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems.
A remote DoS vulnerability has been discovered in VirtualBox VM. This vulnerability is caused due to insufficient validation on a malformed message. It can lead to a crash in VirtualBox VM due to an unexpected error and shutdown of the guest OS running inside it as a result.

Solutions

FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:

Oracle.VirtualBox.VM.DoS
Released Oct 23, 2015
Users should apply the solution provided by Oracle.

Additional Information

1) "VirtualBox_Extension_Pack" should be installed to enable VirtualBox Remote Display Server. 2) Authentication is not required to successfully launch the DoS attack.

References

Acknowledgement

This vulnerability was discovered by Honggang Ren of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs.

IPS Subscription

Fortinet customers who subscribe to Fortinet's intrusion prevention (IPS) service should be protected against this vulnerability with the appropriate configuration parameters in place. Fortinet's IPS service is one component of FortiGuard Subscription Services, which also offer comprehensive solutions such as antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam capabilities. These services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. FortiGuard Services are continuously updated by FortiGuard Labs, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats. These updates are delivered to all FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiClient products. Fortinet strictly follows responsible disclosure guidelines to ensure optimum protection during a threat's lifecycle.